Changing the World, One Birth at a Time

It was not so long ago that psychologists thought babies were born as “blank slates.” Babies were born into the world without memories, we were told—without emotion, without consciousness. They came in with just a physical body that would someday later develop into a thinking, feeling, loving human being.

It was not so long ago that scientists told us that pregnancy was just a period of biological maturation, a time for the genetic blueprint to be constructed into the baby’s cells, tissues, and organs. Expectant mothers and fathers were left only to hope that with a little luck, their soon-tobe prides and joys would get “the good genes” and be born with 10 fingers and 10 toes.

We all know different now. When a woman feels her baby moving within her belly, reacting to her voice and to her mood, she knows that it is not just a physical body moving around inside her. It is her living child responding to her.

Decades of scientific research in the fields of embryology, neurology, and psychology now prove, beyond the shadow of a doubt, what mothers have always known: Babies are born fully conscious. And not only are they born that way, but babies are conscious in the womb as well. Pioneers in the field of prenatal and perinatal psychology have documented that babies in utero form memories and learn, and can respond and adapt to their external environment.

Experts in the field of epigenetics have studied how a baby’s genetic expression is not solely programmed by the DNA supplied by Dad’s sperm and Mom’s egg. The prenatal experiences of nutritional deficiencies, chronic stress, and acute emotional trauma influence certain genes to turn on and others to turn off, forever altering the development of that unborn child.

And it is not just the fetus’s physical development that’s affected; it affects the emotional expression of the baby as well. We must remember that the unborn baby’s external environment is the mother’s internal environment. What the mother eats, drinks, breathes, thinks, feels, and experiences all affect her baby.

The world the mother experiences for those 40 weeks is really preparing her baby for the world she perceives it to be. If she has a stressful pregnancy, her baby’s development will prepare her to meet that stressful world. If she has a blissful pregnancy, her baby will be prepared for that happy and peaceful world and expect to meet it.

With this understanding, we now have an incredible opportunity.

We now can consciously bring babies into the world that have marinated in the womb for 9 months with all the wonderful ingredients you would want every new being on this planet to share:

The feelings of peace, calm, and safety.

The feelings of connection, love, and community.

The feeling of being welcomed and wanted in this world.

If an entire generation of humanity were to be birthed into this world consciously, safely, and naturally, so that the negative imprints of a stressful prenatal experience or a traumatic birth never restricted, limited, or impeded early development, imagine the impact it would have on the world!

If an entire generation of children were allowed to grow and develop fully immersed in unconditional love— if they were enthusiastically encouraged to follow their hearts and then were courageously launched out into the world as their passionate, fully actualized selves to do the very thing they were born into this world to do, imagine the impact it would have on the world!

Knowing what we now know about pregnancy, birth, epigenetics, pre- and perinatal psychology, and early childhood development, we should be able to see the possibility for this shift.

And knowing what we know now, we have a responsibility to create the space for this transformation to take place.